1,000 Tonnes of Hidden Haylage with Pat Hull and Ben Wright

Speaker 1 0:00
Welcome to the Hay Matters podcast brought to you by Feed Central and LocalAg, I’m your host, Jon Paul driver, today I’m handing things over to Steve and Tim, who are diving into one of those classic only an ag stories. Steve recently met a grain grower who bought a block in 2021 and unexpectedly found himself with a few extra tonnes of feed on his hands. He’s since sold some through LocalAg and the rest; well, you’ll hear the story. Let’s get into it.

Tim Ford 0:39
Welcome to the Feed Central Hay Matters podcast, I’m Tim Ford, and I’m here with our Grower Services Manager, Steve Page, Steve, you’ve just gotten back from a big trip up and down the countryside, which is quite normal for you, but just give us a bit of a rundown about what you saw.

Stephen Page 0:57
Yeah, Tim, so I got down into Central New South Wales. This time leaving Gundigi, it was still quite wet round there. They’re still having trouble getting onto some of their country crops planted and cotton picked. But made my way down through Central New South Wales. Got down as far as West. Wyalong on the way down? The season was quite good, up to about Forbes, North of Forbes. Then through that region, they’re having a really good season. So around that, Dubbo, there’s some early crops, Gilgandra, early crops, quite advanced, some of them. And you get down just north of Forbes there, it’s starting to dry out a little bit. And then I went down to West Wyalong. That’s as far as got down on this trip. Yeah, it was starting to get a little bit dry around that area. They had 15 mil while I was there, but, and which they’re all very appreciative of. But, yeah, it wasn’t looking too bad up until there.

Tim Ford 1:50
And Steve something a little bit unusual this trip you’ve you’re inspected and had a yarn with a grower that’s put some silage away a few years ago. Do you just want to elaborate on that we’re about to hear the podcast that you did with them. But do you just want to give a bit of a brief rundown about what that’s about?

Stephen Page 2:09
Yeah. So it was lovely to catch up with Patrick Hull, who, he’s just outside Warren there. He also won our one of our awards, or that we gave away our prizes that we give away every month on LocalAg, and caught up with Patrick. He was digging up some haylage out of a pit that had been buried on that farm about four to five years earlier. Patrick didn’t actually own the property when it was done, but yeah, he knew the product was there. He actually kept driving in the front gate of that place and kept seeing the mounds where it had been buried underneath. So Pat doesn’t have any livestock, not interested in having livestock in the future, so decided that he wanted to tidy that area up. It all seemed to come together with the drought down south and Feed Central, moving into LocalAg, he was then able to open one of those pits up, see what he had, and then start to market that haylage through us and LocalAg, into a buyer, down into Victoria.

Tim Ford 3:13
Steve, I’ve, I’ve seen the photos, but the listeners on the podcast won’t have seen the photos. Can you just describe what you saw? So this is a, this is a big hole in the ground, and then they’ve buried bulk silage or buried hay. What’s actually happened here?

Stephen Page 3:17
Yeah. So what happened was, it was a very good season, so the previous owner decided that he didn’t have the livestock to actually eat that product, so he got a local contractor, Ben Wright, to come in. They cut it, conditioned it got it into bales. The bales weren’t the 8x4s that they not that Ben normally does. They were a little bit shorter. He then made it into haylage, not so much silage, and Ben will explain this in his section of the podcast, but it’s the moisture actually came back between that 40 and 50% and that way, they stacked them into this pit in the ground. I think they, if I remember correct, they were about three wide, four wide and about three high or four high in the pit and going down into the ground. They then laid plastic on over the top, and then put the soil back over on top. So in that sort of situation, that product, providing it’s done correctly, can actually last in the ground for a lot, a lot of years. But this one Pat had decided that he wanted to tidy that area up, and he was digging them up.

Tim Ford 4:35
So it’s a really, essentially forage sorghum, bailed into hay, into big square bales, and essentially buried in the ground. Is that that sort of what’s happened?

Stephen Page 4:46
Yes, Tim, that’s right. I believe it was getting a little bit late in the season too, so that it was starting to come into the winter months, and they decided to cut it and bale it.

Tim Ford 4:56
Just digging into the Feed Test here it’s seems to have feed tested extremely well, especially for forage sorghum, it’s had a crude protein of 12.4%ME energy of 9.25 NDF neutral detergent fibre of 51.4 and ADF acid detergent fibre of 35.7 they seem like really, really great numbers. And just to clarify, the feed test, moisture reading has come back at 58.3% moisture and 41.7% dry matter, which gives an indication that, yeah, it’s, it’s around that 60% moisture and 40% dry matter. So it just gives a bit a bit more insight into the actual quality of the product here. So I understand this has been sold over the LocalAg platform and gone into dairies in Victoria. So it’s essentially moved from Warren in the central western New South Wales to dairy farmers in the Southwest of Victoria. It’s quite a story, and it’s also, right, it’s got many, many stories around it, but you’ve spent some time this week talking to Pat Hull, the farm owner and Ben Wright, who’s actually the contractor that did all the work and put the bales in the hole and harvested and so forth. So we might let you just introduce that podcast, Steve and yeah, thanks very much for the chat today.

Stephen Page 6:21
Thanks, Tim. Yeah. I had a lovely chat catch up with Pat. He was very accommodating and welcomed us on the farm. So I’ll now say hello to pat. Good morning. It’s Steve Page here from Feed Central, and this morning I’m with Patrick Hull. Patrick’s just opened up a silage pit that’s on a property of his. And, yeah, just having a look at that, and it’s been marketed through LocalAg, just to discuss how it’s all going for him and what’s happening, Patrick. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the property that we’re on and what’s going on on the property?

Pat Hull 7:00
Yeah, for sure. So we’re on property called Weebergong. We’re about 25k west of Gulargambone. Our main thing here, or our only thing, is grain on this particular property. And we’ve got another property down the road, another two properties down the road, yeah. So mainly what we’re focused on is canola, wheat, barley, some legumes at times. But this year, all canola, wheat and barley, yeah. So that’s where we’re at.

Stephen Page 7:29
And how long have you had this property?

Pat Hull 7:31
This property we purchased in 2022 Yeah. We purchased it as a it was a grazing property, and we’ve converted it all across to to, yeah, farming, no till, farming operation. So it’s been a bit of a process getting it there. But yeah, this year is probably the first time we’re sort of recognising the work we’ve put into it.

Stephen Page 7:54
And it’s a good region. You like this region, this area that you’re here, you’ve been here for a number of years? Or what? Second? Third generation.

Pat Hull 8:00
Third generation, yeah. Love the region. My grandfather came out here from after the war. He was from Sydney. He was injured in the war, and then came out and worked on a property at Coonamble called Carwell Station. And from there, him and another bloke bought a mob of sheep together and made a bit of money out of the sheep, and was able to put enough money together to get a deposit for a property west of Coonamble, out near Corinda. And from there, I think they sold that in the 60s and bought Hundon, which is just down the road where my brother is now in I think 1964 so that was my grandfather. My dad took over that. Mum and Dad have since retired. They’re in Dubbo now and then. In 2020 we split it and with my father and his old man had bought a bit of country through the 80s and 90s together and built it up, sort of. They had about 8500 acres there. I think so. My brother and I split that up. In 2020 he took all the grazing country. I took all the cropping country, and and then we’ve since added on from that, yeah.

Stephen Page 9:09
And you haven’t been enticed to get into a little bit of livestock yourself?

Pat Hull 9:13
You don’t know the tractors. Yeah, I was cured of livestock. We used to, we used to come home from boarding school, and dad had saved up all the cattle work for us in in the early 2000s So, yeah, I was cured of it from a from a young age, I think so. Yeah, at this stage, I have no intention of of getting into livestock, yeah.

Stephen Page 9:36
So you bought the, bought this property, and at that stage you had this, these silage pits in there. Can you tell me a little bit about finding that and opening those pits up and finding out what you what you saw?

Pat Hull 9:48
For sure. So we bought this property, like I said, in 2022 and it was a grazing property. It was owned by a bloke from out at White Cliffs, so I think he might have used it. As a fattening block. They used to grow a bit of forage, you know, stock feed here, and stuff like that. So obviously we came out of the drought in 2018-19, I think we had good rain in March 2020, and I, from what I understand this, all this forage, sorghum and and open hay was all growing on that early rain in 2020 and when we bought the place, it was obviously they marketed it with the place, because there was a significant amount there. I think there’s about they told us there was roughly 1000 tonne there. So, and from what we’ve worked out since we’ve opened a pit up, we think that’s pretty accurate, there might be 800 to 1000 tonne there. So we knew it was there. We sort of had it’s been in the back of our mind. It the and we weren’t really sure what to do with it. And I think I was saying just before we started, that I drive past it and I don’t like, I don’t like where it is because it’s been buried and it’s on the driveway, and there’s all these heaps of dirt on the driveway where this stuff’s buried, and we weren’t really sure what it was going to be like and what sort of a job was done on it. And we managed to track down the contractor who did the did the job, and spoke to him, and he was really good with information, and from all accounts, he was, you know, well regarded contractor, and did a good job in the area with it so, and he’d done quite a bit of it before. So we decided, when things were getting tight for feed down in Victoria and South Australia and stuff, we started seeing a little bit of you know information about running out of hay and things like that. We thought it was probably a good opportunity, and because it wouldn’t be as sought after as hay in a normal season. We thought, well, it might be a good opportunity to move it being a little bit more desperation around for the product. So we got an excavator in and we we opened up three pits. I think there’s six pits there, six or seven pits there. We opened up three, one still wrapped and but it is open, it is accessible. And we thought we’d just make a start anyway. We pulled a few bales out, and we we sort of wanted to see what it had looked like. And we managed to get some photos off the contractor who did the job of it going in. So that was pretty valuable. And we were able to use feed central to market that with the pictures of it going into the ground. So we actually advertised it before we we opened a pit up because we had this awkward time where we weren’t sure if it was going to be any good, but we didn’t want to go to the trouble of opening a pit up if we couldn’t get a market for it regardless. So we got the photos of it from when it went into the ground. It looked good going into the ground. We put it up. We had quite a bit of interest in it. We weren’t sure of the value of it, because I’m very inexperienced with this haylage, especially. So we just threw a number out there, and we didn’t get much interest. So we’ll obviously a bit dear. So we pulled the price down. And that that was easy to do, and that sort of generated a bit more interest. And from what I understand now, it’s more so priced, more so based on the moisture content and stuff like that, versus hay. So once we sort of got the price range right, we got a we got a lot of interest. We had we managed to open a pit up. Once we opened a pit up. Worked out that well, we were going to be able to transport a reasonable amount of it a good distance, because it’s only been in the ground for two, three years. It’s, you know, a lot of this stuff goes in the ground with people planning on it being there 20 years. So it hasn’t been buried for a great deal of time. So, yeah, we’ve, we’ve been able to pull it out and sort of draft off any any bales that are a bit ordinary, and keep the ones that have still got, you know, their integrity, and we’ve been able to load them, and the first truck has actually gone down to Victoria today.

Stephen Page 13:53
Tell us your experiences with LocalAg, you advertise that through Feed Central on LocalAg, you did your own ad on the system. How did that go for you? And how was the contact between you and the buyer? Did you do all that?

Pat Hull 14:07
Yeah, it was really easy. So I’d never really done any of this stuff before. We’d only ever been on the on the buying side of it. Back when we were, you know, I was still in the family operation, and we were running stock, so I just, I from memory, I just contacted Jill. I got her number. Must have been off the website or something. She just told us to set up the app, which took about five minutes. I just had to grab a few photos, and we just gave a rough description of what it was, put some photos up there to see if we could get any feelers. And then once we got, you know, some interest, then we gathered more information for the people that were interested. But it was really easy and straightforward. It took, you know, it was advertised and we were getting interest in it, you know, inside a couple hours it was, it was real, and it and it reached a really broad. Audience of people, I suppose, you know, I had contact from people in, you know, South Australia, Victoria, all over the place. So it was, it was really sort of straightforward and easy, and Jill was looking after it for us. So, you know, anything that we sort of missed or needed, she was sort of honest about it. You know, we had to fill this out or do that, to organise secured payments and things like that. So it was, yeah, she sort of held her hand through the process, which made it easy.

Stephen Page 15:30
And so what really drew you to LocalAg, is there any particular thing that you liked with it, or, like, there’s other marketing sites out there that can market it too. But is there any particular reason for LocalAg?

Pat Hull 15:42
Well, I think from what I understand was Feed Central and LocalAg, were LocalAg, is a new thing to Feed Central. And we dealt with Feed Central in the drought in 2018 and 19 for us. So I actually went looking for Feed Central and came across LocalAg. That’s sort of how it that’s sort of how it happened. So that was basically where that relationship started with the LocalAg app.

Stephen Page 16:10
And so the communication you had with between yourself and the buyer that was all through the app, in the text backwards and forwards.

Pat Hull 16:17
Yep. That was all through the app, which was good, because you could sort of get an understanding of what someone wanted before you were getting phone calls and stuff about it, or you could, you could respond to stuff as It suited you, like you could gather information and then come back. You weren’t getting caught off guard, or, you know, getting like on through Facebook or something like that, through marketplace, you might get, you know, 20 phone calls in a day, and you just don’t have time to handle it. So with with LocalAg, we found that because your phone numbers not out there, it’s all through the app. Everything’s written down, the agreement is all there for every for everyone to see. There’s no grey areas. It takes that out of it, so everyone sort of knows where they stand. There’s no you said this or you said that. And we also had, you know, Jill was handling our stuff. So she was sort of, she moderated things for us, like, would, you know, keep an eye on it, or if, you know, someone asked a question that, you know didn’t make sense, she would and I hadn’t got back to them, she would get back to them for me. Or if we hadn’t responded to someone, we would actually get contacted by LocalAg and say, you know, you’ve got an unread message. So it was actually really good, like that. So it sort of protects everyone. I think it keeps it protects the the buyer, you know. And from a selling point of view, we weren’t getting, you know, 20 or 30 phone calls from a stack of different people every day.

Stephen Page 17:53
So it was really good. So you’re obviously happy with the process. Would you use it again?

Pat Hull 17:58
I’d definitely use it again, yeah, for sure. Yeah, like I said, where we predominantly are grain producers. You know, this silage or haylage in particular, is very opportunity because it’s come with a property that we’ve purchased, but we would like to see an opportunity to probably market more of our feed grains on LocalAg, so barley, or, you know, if we were in a situation where we had feed wheat or something like that. But we will, if we find ourselves in a situation, we’d probably be now thinking about it here now like we’d probably be more inclined to look at baling crops in the right situation. If there was an opportunity, we’ve always steered away from it, because from a marketing point of view, it’s a lot more difficult than grain to market hay. You’ve got to have you’ve got to have contacts, and you’ve got to know where to go, whereas LcoalAg, is a really we found was a really simple way to reach buyers. So might, yeah, going forward, if there is a situation we might think more seriously about, you know, bailing some, like we might bail some, you know, cereal, some barley, or something like that, because we will find that a bit easier to reach buyers. It’s probably been the biggest challenge, and probably why we’ve steered away from it, because it’s a lot easier for us to sell grain, barley into the system than try and find a market for hay. So it’s something that probably does open up a few more opportunities for us going forward.

Stephen Page 19:27
Spreads your risk, yes, a number of different areas. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. You know timing area for basically through the season, you don’t yeah, if you’re starting to run out of moisture or anything like that, you got an opportunity to make some.

Pat Hull 19:39
Yeah, for sure, yeah. And it just gives us that easy, accessible platform without having to, you know, find a merchant or something to sell it for us. You know, we can sell direct to anyone through an app, like local, LocalAg, so I think it’s, it’s really good for that. I’m happy with the whole experience. Overall, yeah. Yeah, it’s been really good. Yeah, I’m really happy with how things are going with, with, with the local air gap. Yeah, it’s been really good. Yeah.

Stephen Page 20:07
All right, thanks, Pat. Thanks for your time. And yeah, lovely to catch up with you, and hopefully the rest of it silage goes well and the rest of the season goes well for you.

Pat Hull 20:15
Thanks. Thanks very much for having me.

Stephen Page 20:20
I’m here with Ben Wright, and Ben’s contracting business is Central West contracting based in Dubbo, and Ben was responsible for doing the baling of Pat Hull’s haylage that we had a look at earlier on today, and that Pat was pulling out of the pit. And I just wanted to have a chat to Ben and just discuss the history of that so, Ben, can you give us a little bit of a rundown on that lot?

Ben Wright 20:44
Yeah, so that sorghum, I think it was planted we’ve been planning in the summer of, like, of 19, I guess when, like, obviously, the worst drought we’d seen, apparently. And that would have been planned as opportunity crop, I guess. And then we had that early break in 2020, all, that rain and all these summer crops all went nuts, I guess, which then in the coming the winter, we had all these bulk, bulk of feed, and all these blokes are looking for something to do with it. So we, that’s, we end up cutting a lot of this forage, sorghum for for sort of haylage to get buried for, like, the future, sort of drought proof themselves, I guess was the main goal, yeah, how many cuts did you get off that? No, it was only one. Only one cut. It was sort of starting to mature a little bit when we when we did cut it, because it was in like, June or July, I think we done the job. So obviously the plant was starting to shut down and do its thing.

Stephen Page 21:36
So you cut it with a mower, conditioner, yeah, yeah. And how many rakings Did you get?

Ben Wright 21:42
Yes, we cut it with our triple mower into like our like three rows, obviously spread out nice and wide to get as dry as we could. Then raked this right, pulled the three rows together, raked it, and then just bailed it.

Stephen Page 21:53
And what moisture level Did you get it at? Do you think

Ben Wright 21:56
I was thinking about around 800 odd kilos? That’s what we usually try to aim like maximum sort of moisture, usually, otherwise the moisture is getting too wide. I’m calling it 35% moisture, something like that.

Stephen Page 22:09
Righto. And the size of the bales?

Ben Wright 22:11
Six foot. Do them 6x6x4x3. Just for the handling. We do get some people, when you go to bury some, they do them in eight foots, just to if it’s if you can get it dry, obviously, different conditions and different crop types. That same year, we we done some other stuff at Warren too, and they did them in eight foot bars. They had big, big, um, Arctic loaders, and the crop was a lot dry when we did, when we did do that, that job.

Stephen Page 22:34
You’ve had a bit of history of doing this in the past, and it’s come out reasonably well for you or for the grower in the past, yeah.

Ben Wright 22:40
It seems to me, it seems like a good option, good drought proof option, I suppose, like how people say that it’s been had stuff in the ground for 20 years, pulled them out, and they look just as good as, um, as the day they put him in there, almost like it’s Yeah, and just no weather damage, no mice damage, yeah, anyway. And even, even had clients, um, recently, like, they, they usually bury, they’ve been burying, like, hay too, for the same, same reason, like, just to put it away for a drought and mice proof.

Stephen Page 23:08
And this lot was done into haylage. That’s because of the time of the year you’re trying to bail it. You couldn’t get the moistures down any further.

Ben Wright 23:15
Nah, that’s right, it was pretty cold when we done it, like June or July, around Warren at some yeah, it was pretty, some pretty dewy nights there, I suppose, especially after all the big rain we had in the mortime. So yeah, that’s a that was the call for haylage.

Stephen Page 23:29
And can you remember roughly how many days it was actually down for?

Ben Wright 23:32
Think it was on the ground for about five days, five to seven days, from rough memory, and it started like the late all. The late all, the leaf started drying pretty, pretty fast, actually. But it’s just that this, that last sort of big stem sort of holds a fair bit of moisture. And yeah, so that was the only that’s the killer, I suppose.

Stephen Page 23:50
And it was a forage variety, or was it a grain variety? Can you remember?

Ben Wright 23:54
I’m pretty sure it was a triple s. I’m pretty sure it was so pioneer Triple S.

Stephen Page 23:58
And can you give us a little bit of a description on how they how the pit was made, and how they actually put it in and covered it?

Ben Wright 24:05
Yep, yeah, they done it. They dug it with an excavator. I think they went three, three or four bales wide, just for the fact to try and so the excavator could put the dirt back on them, plus scratch the dirt off when, when we went to get it out. And I think they went four bars high, and the top bar was put maybe just above ground, yeah, just above ground level. And then they put all the dirt back on top, as pits, like, as, like a, like a pitch roof, I guess you’d say. And they use plastic. They put some plastic around it to protect it, yep, I think the key is only plastic on top, no plastic on the bottom, because I don’t think any any water gets in there. It can’t get away. But I think they just put plastic over top, and then sort of hung it over the sides. Then as they back, filled it just the the dirt sort filled in the sides, and it was the sides a bit protected from the plastic from to the dirt, right?

Stephen Page 24:56
Okay, I think that’s about all. Ben, what are your thoughts? It’s it’s a good option.

Ben Wright 25:00
Option. Good option. We just found the the dryer the better you can’t do can’t bear it too wet. Otherwise, those bottom bales, like they seem to squash the wet, if it’s too wet, or if it’s hot, higher moisture, like pretty high moisture, it’ll, um, the bottom bales will squash, and you’ll pull them out, and the bottom bar will be only, like a foot tall, sort of thing. So that’s something we’ve found out.

Stephen Page 25:17
So what would be the maximum moisture you would think you’d go into a pit with?

Ben Wright 25:21
I’d nearly say 40, 40% Yeah, something like that, I reckon, yeah. And what about inoculants? Ah, we didn’t put knocking on that stuff. But I, I’ve come to the conclusion inoculants cheap. When you’ve got that investment, it’s for extra couple dollars a tonne. It’s, it’s not, sort of not a bad, bad option, really. Just put it on and, yeah, keep it more stable when you open it up, I guess.

Stephen Page 25:41
Aand that’s silage inoculant, not hay inoculant.

Ben Wright 25:44
No, it’s a silage inoculant. So you use lalaman inoculant for that stuff, and it seems to work pretty well.

Stephen Page 25:50
Thank you, Ben, thank you for your time, and lovely to see you again.

Ben Wright 25:53
No worries.

Jon Paul Driver 25:53
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